trial VS Arcadia

Little Spark - made with Trial

The engine is called Trial. https://github.com/shirakumo/trial.

I don't know what the situation is like for 3D game programming in CL. Shinmera recently kickstarted a game but it's 2D I think and I don't know if his engine (https://github.com/Shirakumo/trial) does 3D. But regardless of what you're using, going into learning how to program while also trying to learn how to use the game engines available in the CL world will probably be a recipe for getting overwhelmed and discouraged. I'd recommend going through the Steve Losh post first and reading A Gentle Introduction to Symbolic Computation and/or Practical Common Lisp to get some solid general familiarity with using CL. Both are available online for free. You can also browse through the Cookbook: https://lispcookbook.github.io/cl-cookbook/

For graphics there's a lot of different variants and options. I use Trial, but that doesn't have any docs yet, I'm afraid.

Kandria and Eternia both are built on top of the game engine Trial, which I and a few others at Shirakumo have been working on for some years now. Trial itself makes use of a bunch of lower level libraries like cl-opengl, GLFW, pngload, harmony, etc. but a huge amount of the codebase was written by me. If you're interested in its development, I recommend hopping by the #shirakumo channel on the Freenode IRC network. I'd be happy to answer questions there!

A good way to do it is to keep a staging area of sorts that keeps track of the manually allocated objects and their state. When you allocate you batch all objects to allocate together and then execute the load in one go, updating the records in the staging area. Then, when you're ready to switch to a different scene or whatever, you diff the staging area against the current set of objects that need to be live and deallocate everything else in one go.

If ECS gets too boiler-platey for my liking I might try some of the "don't use MonoBehaviours" approaches people have suggested, perhaps with F# bundled into a .dll. I also saw that some mad scientists had bridged the gap between Clojure and Unity via a framework called Arcadia - we'll see!

arcadia adds clojure (a lisp) to unity as a scripting language. You get to use a very good and well documented 3d game engine while still scripting stuff in your game in a lisp. there's a godot version too. The blender>unity/godot pipeline is pretty easy and documented. However, these game engines themselves are a lot to learn for your first game, especially if you're doing unorthodox stuff with them such as using lisp you won't find many tutorials.

Nowadays, Clojure can be used for this sort of stuff. Arcadia has been used to make real world games. Lead developer gave a talk about it a few years ago.

Clojure started out on the CLR before the decision was made to focus on the JVM instead, and some people still maintain an unofficial ClojureCLR port. Some people used that to make Arcadia, which builds on ClojureCLR to make it work in Unity. Here's an old video of someone Clojure's REPL-driven development to make on-the-fly scene changes, kind of cool.

Arcadia uses ClojureCLR to work with Clojure in unity. Also Godot engine version.

My understanding is that the Clojure community points everyone to Arcadia[0] since it's maintained and a bit more public about what their exact goals are. Unfortunately, neither are terribly well documented and so I've not personally used either

[0]: https://github.com/arcadia-unity/arcadia